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1 0 7 The industry track at Granite Rock was a little pastoral interlude on the district job. Not that the tracks and switches were in good condition, or the adjacent junkyard pull was not treacherous. The granite dust on summer days made you reach for your bandana or a dust mask for your face, if you had to be out in the fine powder the engine kicked up. The tracks leading in ran along Coyote Creek, which kept its natural shape, only occasionally sandbagged to shore up the trailer park hidden near its entrance, a residential enclave sandwiched between Georgia Pacific, a tank farm called Cap Snap and Seal, and City Metals. I always felt the presence of the invisible people in the trailer park living there beside the creek, off the grid of Silicon Valley, hidden inside its industrial maze. The railroad ran behind the façade. Other people found shelter there as well, the homeless urban campers whose cardboard homes I increasingly thought of as “California condos.” Our move at Granite Rock was to pull loads and deliver empties, while watching out for the Sikh truck drivers lining up at the artificial pyramids of sand to do the same. Making a joint one day, radio in hand, sweating blindly into my dirt-coated overalls, a Sikh driver chatted me up. “Hello. You have a good job. You want to meet a working man? I am a good person. I go to temple.” There was a certain magic to the place. While I was waiting for my braking partner to run around the cars or pull the spots, I would sometimes look into the woods by the creek bank, amazed that something natural could continue its life here. Like the wild datura blooming beside the tracks at night, the shape of the land revealed itself. The spiritual beauty of the rails pulled back the myopic lens, showinganotherhistory,anotherlifeinsidewhatIassumedwaslife. Of course, it was here that I would find the portrait of a Mexican devil on the porch of a hopper car. California has a long history of Mexican labor, starting, of course, when it was Mexico. Since those days, people have moved back and forth across the line in the sand, the railroad being the road to ride. The Santa Clara and Salinas valleys have mostly converted from agribusiness to high tech, but remnantsremain ,andpickersstillcomewiththeseasonshere.Theyalso work other jobs, but Silicon Valley salaries have made rentals out of reach, so they sleep on mattresses beside the rails, in the Hotel Mira Estrellas, the Hotel Look at the Stars. I would read in the paper that crash space on someone’s floor was going for $200 a month, so in thesehiddenrailroaddistricts,whatIwasseeingwereworkingmen, as well as winos, making the unpoliced railroad space their home. As in LA, there was gang graffiti on the warehouse walls facing the tracks, and tag crews often marked the cars in the yard, leaving their empty cans in the toe paths, a true hazard for trainmen in the dark. This artist, however, had taken his time. The entire sloping rearporchofthecementhopperwascoveredwithablack-and-white portrait of the Spanish devil of the Inquisition, a face I had seen on countless Mexican dance masks. The more I understood about T H E H O P P E R A T G R A N I T E R O C K 15 RailroadNoir.indb 107 12/17/09 2:03 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 1 0 8 Mexico, the more I saw that we were like intertwined hands. Mexican folk art was practiced here, at Granite Rock, and in the tagged graffiti, nalgas de oro, Cañas, Zacatecas (butt cheeks of gold), from a little town north of Zacatecas. I made a note to try to go there sometime, the home of nalgas, who was here working in my home. I thought about what the railroad had taught me about where I lived and who else was living there. I saw things that normal citizens never saw. Working LA, I found myself in Echo Park at 2 am contemplatingganggraffitiunderfreewayoverpasses,allalonewith a radio at the end of a mile-long train. I knew where migrant laborers washed in the Guadalupe River just off the 880 Freeway in San Jose. Our day job crossed the trestle each morning, and I saw their possessions hung out to dry on tumbleweeds. Traveling by bus in ever-expanding circles from Mexico City each time I had...

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